Chronicle Covers: How Lincoln’s death helped make The Chronicle

The Chronicle’s front page from April 15, 1865, covers President Abraham Lincoln’s assasination.

This was the scoop that made The Chronicle.

The front page of The Daily Dramatic Chronicle, as it was then known, from April 15, 1865, covers the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Charles and Michael de Young, then 19 and 17, respectively, had founded the newspaper a few months before, and its circulation was still small compared with the other papers in booming town.

“It was part theater program, part newspaper, part satirical review, and mostly ads,” current Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte wrote in 1999. “Much of the paper consisted of pieces of theater news, bright little anecdotes and jokes — some of them written by Mark Twain, who contributed items in exchange for office space. Bret Harte, then a clerk at the Mint, also wrote pieces for the paper. Much to its later regret, The Dramatic Chronicle never saw fit to give either man a byline.”

It was the morning of April 15 during this formative time when Michael de Young walked to the local telegraph office after his paper and his competitors’ had come out. “Have you heard the news?” the telegraph worker said. “Lincoln has been assassinated.”

De Young “memorized the dispatch, ran back to the paper and he and his brother got out an extra (edition),” Nolte wrote. “The other papers, which had taken the rest of the morning off, were badly beaten.”

It was a big scoop, something every journalist at The Chronicle aims for more than 150 years later.

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